Research

There has been quite of a trend of thinking museums in terms of globalisation. For example, critical museum people are discussing the place of their institutions on the global scene (for a very good take on this, see here), and curators have begun to discuss their work in terms of the transnational nature of collections and acquisitioning (see, for example, […]

It’s reasonably easy to imagine how some features of emerging biotechnologies can be turned into museum installations and exhibits. For example, enhancement technologies like nanoprosthetics and tissue engineering can rather easily be imagined as 3D installations. But other concepts are more difficult to translate from words to space. Like morality, for example. I came to […]

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to contribute to a workshop on interdisciplinarity and ageing research, organised by Lene Otto and the humanities section of the Center for Healthy Aging here in Copenhagen on Wednesday 14 December. Why interdisciplinarity? Well, the Center is pretty big — about 150 biomedical scientists, epidemiologists, health service researchers, ethnologists, etc., plus a few communication […]

Many of us here at Medical Museion are fascinated by containers, boxes, flasks etc. in biomedicine — all those kinds of packages that are used for keeping and transporting body parts, cell cultures, chemicals, biobank samples (like the 23andMe box), etc. Such containers are part of the vital infrastructure of both scientific and clinical practice, but […]

My idea for organizing the Sensuous Object workshop began over a year ago. It originated with my interest in (re) placing the object as central and focusing on the sensuous object, i.e. how we sense objects, come to know them, are affected by them and their presence, how objects can become outcomes of research, how […]

I have just had a paper accepted for a very interesting symposium called Representing the Contentious, organized in London 14 October by Bronwyn Parry, Ania Dabrowska and Wellcome Trust People Award. My presentation contains many images from my PhD Delineating Disease: a system for investigating Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva that were not presented to the public for reasons I […]

After more than half a year of budget negotations, Medical Museion is now officially part of the EC 7th FWP programme-financed project StudioLab. Inspired by the merging of the artists studio with the research lab to create a hybrid creative space, STUDIOLAB proposes the creation of a new European platform for creative interactions between art and science. […]

Part of my summer reading has been N. Katherine Hayles very interesting and stimulating book, How We Became Posthuman – Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. The book details the rise of the informational logic of life from the rise of the cybernetic paradigm in the late 1940s and onwards. Hayles writes the book […]

I thought of sending this abstract to the Artefacts meeting in the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, 25-27 September (this year’s theme is ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’): COLLECTION IMPOSSIBLE: Distributed curatorship as an alternative to centralised acquisitioning Centralised collecting of the artefacts from contemporary science, technology and medical (STM) visual and material culture […]

Prompted by a recent guest blog post on the Scientific American site, I’ve just revisited an almost 40 year old essay titled “Discovery and understanding” by the Finland-Swedish neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize Winner Ragnar Granit. Growing out of a talk (see video here) that Granit gave at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1972, the essay was published in the Annual Review of Physiology later the same year. I remember dimly having read […]